I quit Google two years ago to go into teaching. I've published some of my Android material online to see if it can be useful for this community. The address is http://jacqueslenormand.com/mobile . There's a chat window on the bottom so that you can ask questions. I hope that this will be useful for some learners. My goal is to create a community of people to help each other out.

I wanted to add a preferences screen to my app today with a couple options. Seemed simple enough, thought I would whip it out fairly quickly. Boy was I surprised. So far I found PreferenceActivity, PreferenceFragment, PreferenceFragmentCompat, a v7 preference support library, and a v14 preference support library. From what I understand, PreferenceActivity was for pre-honeycomb use, and now fragments are the way to go. So I tried that, and realized I needed to wrap my fragments still in a main settings activity. Then, I tried to get a nice material looking action bar at the top, which was a mess if you want to support Lollipop and below.

Please tell me I am missing something and there is an easier way to do this? My min SDK is 16. How are you all creating preference screens?

I'm planning to develop an android app that will translate a specific native language to English and vice versa

This native language is new and there's no api/Libraries available in the internet.

This application will be offline and I'm planning to import all the words and equivalence translation into database.

That's my idea but it seems it would be ugly since the sentence structure and grammar might be horrible.

I'm looking over the internet and I couldn't find an answer how could I finish this project. I also check the Google translate API but I dont know if it will allow me to add language and follow it's logic.

Anyway, Can you help me how could I finish this? Is there any API/Libraries that can help me to minimize my problem

I have all my POST and GET requests working, and now I'm considering accounts. user accounts are still a maybe (for things like setting show-reminders, 'favoriting' different bands and venues in order to sort shows based on those, etc. I just don't want this to turn into some kind of social media), but I definitely need some type of accounts for various venues so that they can update their information and also add their various shows to the database.

For venue accounts... Would it be better to have it integrated into the app itself? They can register, choose their account type (venue) and then they have the options to add/edit their shows (show details and selecting which bands are playing).. Or would it make more sense to have a website that venue accounts can use to log in and add/edit their shows?

I feel like a web page might help prevent normal users from creating fake venue accounts and adding bogus shows. I guess it probably doesn't matter too much since this app probably won't actually be used, but I am curious which design makes more sense.

I also considered having a separate app for venues to download, but that seems like it might be the worst idea.

I've been using unity for quite a while so I'm very familiar with C#. I wanted to work on some actual apps (not games) I had in mind. My question is would Xamarin be a good choice for doing cross platform for IOS and andiord? I have experience with C# but not really with Java or objective-C.

I have remade my old quiz app with native Android code, and added a couple of UI flairs and page redesigns. The Play Store listing can be found here. Please check it out and leave any suggestions if you like.

The source code for this entire project can be found on my github repository through this link.